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by Anonymous



Category: Supernatural
Genre: BAMF Castiel (Supernatural), Body Horror, Cas Is Okay At The End, Castiel (Supernatural) Whump, Castiel in danger, Gen, Hurt Castiel (Supernatural), Hurt/Comfort, Leviathans, Protective Winchesters (Supernatural), Scared Castiel (Supernatural), The Winchesters Come For Cas
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-03-23
Updated: 2019-03-23
Packaged: 2019-11-28 10:56:22
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,012
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18207461
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/
Summary: The hunt for a serial killer using magic ends badly for Cas when he’s left seriously hurt and bleeding and alone.But things can always get worse, as Cas is faced with the last surviving Leviathan on Earth, who very much wants inside him.Only one of them is getting out of this.





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**Author's Note:**

> The person Cas hunts has caught and killed and displayed a lot of people so please be aware that’s in this story.
> 
> There’s also body horror, generally the level you’d expect involving those horrible Leviathan.

Jeremiah Lawrence didn’t die easily.

For all he was _just_ a human, he was a human with knowledge, and power, and he used both to keep Castiel at bay as the angel battled to reach him.

Even then, with his final moments approaching, he wouldn’t give in.

Castiel felt the tug as Jeremiah reached into his head, no doubt trying to trick him or even _reset_ him. Neither worked, and the angel was able to push through the bubble of dark magic surrounding the old man and drive his blade into his heart.

The victory didn’t come without cost; Jeremiah grabbed hold of Cas’s coat and yanked him down with a strength that seemed borrowed from something Castiel knew he’d hate to owe such a debt to.

“Think you’ve won, creature, don’t you?” He rasped, coughed, and bloody splittle landed on Cas’s cheeks. “There’s a price to pay for disturbing my work….my glorious work…”

He half twisted to look behind him, at the bodies broken and rearranged to fit into a gory, morbid tableau spiked to the cabin wall.

Cas’s eyes followed, heart aching as he saw the people he’d failed to save, people he hadn’t even known needed saving until Jeremiah got too eager and his killings drew the attention of the Winchesters.

That was a mistake, the guilty distraction, and he paid for it. Pain exploded in his side, and he tried to push the old man back but Jeremiah wouldn’t let go.

He grinned, teeth smeared with his own blood, and stared eagerly into Cas’s eyes.

“You’re not leaving this cabin,” he promised. “You’ll suffer...and you’ll die….”

Then he was gone, body dangling from the angel’s hold, and Cas let him drop and staggered back.

He looked down and groaned at the damage Jeremiah had inflicted; Cas didn’t know how, since the only weapons wielded by him were magical, but his shirt was drenched in blood.

When he pulled his shirt open, and pushed down his pants, both movements that ramped up the pain, he saw what looked like a massive stab wound to his side.

His Grace was already working to heal it, but blood was flowing freely from the wound, and Cas felt his legs shake and then give.

He crashed down, crying out at the explosion of agony, and lay there, panting.

Trying to focus himself, concentrate on bearing the pain and letting his Grace do its job, was hard. The time of such injuries healing near instantly, and being easily ignored in the meantime, was long gone.

But Jeremiah had been too sure of himself and his power, borrowed from whatever creature he’d sold himself to in return for it.

Cas was hurt, yes; he would need time to heal, and until then he’d need to rest here, letting all his strength go to recovering, but then he would get up and walk out of here, and go home.

He certainly wouldn’t die in this cabin, on this cold wooden floor, the last of Jeremiah’s victims.

But it was then Cas heard it. Slick, laboured movements that stopped the moment he was aware of them as if whatever it was realised he knew it was there.

Cas couldn’t divert even a fleck of Grace from its current task so, even though he knew moving risked giving his body more work to do in healing himself, he propped himself up onto his elbows, and peered around the dusky cabin interior.

Just because Jeremiah was dead, Cas reasoned, didn’t meant his master, or some other creature or person the old man had been working with, wasn’t still here and looking to finish him off.

But then he saw it, and his whole body churned with fear. 

It was writhing weakly in the shadows by the door, black on black, but there and unmistakable.

And Cas knew then what Jeremiah had been looking for when he’d delved into his head.

Something to terrify him, a weakness to exploit, a way to punish him from beyond the grave for disturbing his ‘work’.

He’d found it.

The leviathan undulated towards him, weak, broken, but still more of a threat than Cas knew he could counter.

Perhaps even if he was whole, and he was in that moment far from that.

He couldn’t even stand.

Which meant he had no way out.

++

Desperate, Cas dug his heels into the floor and pushed back.

The pain almost made him black out, but that would be the end of him, and he fought to hold on to his consciousness as he tried to put distance between him and the thing working its way slowly towards him.

Wherever Jeremiah, or his master, had found this leviathan, it was in a bad way.

They couldn’t last long without either a host or a human body to replicate, and this one had neither and it showed.

Its surface was broken and cracked, a thin ooze leaking out that left disgusting smears behind it like a trail as it dragged itself towards him.

Of course, Cas reasoned, it would want inside him. The others had, and though he remembered little of that time that didn’t involve pain and feeling smothered, he knew they’d considered him shelter.

Home.

And this one wanted that.

It was not going to find it in him. Not again.

But it was still coming, struggling toward him with a desperation that came from wanting to live.

And then, probably, to pick up where Dick Roman had left off because he, Cas, and Dean had killed him.

Cas tightened his grip on his blade even as he tried to put precious inches between him and the thing after him.

It wasn’t going to use him, and it wasn’t going to threaten the world.

It wasn’t leaving this cabin, no matter what Cas had to do to stop it.

But he realised his options were limited. He couldn’t get up, his Grace still trying to heal the damage Jeremiah’s magic had inflicted.

His strength was focused on that task, and each backward lurch to keep him from the Levithan’s reach sapped him further.

And, eventually, Cas found his back literally against the wall, inches below the lowest part of the twisted display of human bodies Jeremiah had so carefully arranged.

He had no more room to retreat, and the Leviathan was still coming.

Cas held his blade in front of him, but he was in grave danger then and knew it.

If the leviathan touched him, it could work to restrain him and then try to get inside. He would end up fighting it, and at that moment Cas wasn’t sure it was a fight he could win.

He looked down at the angel blade, and wondered if he would have time to kill himself with it, and take the Leviathan with him into The Empty, before it fully took control.

But that meant leaving Dean, and Sam, and Jack, and that was the very thing he’d promised not to do, after they got him back that last time.

They needed him, and he raged at the thought of causing them, however unwanted and unintentional, any more pain.

The Leviathan pulled back on itself, and Cas realised too late its intention, and then leapt at him.

It didn’t aim for his weapon, or his upper body as he’d expected, in an attempt to disarm or pin him.

He screamed in agony as it went for his wound instead, flattening its head out to try and force its now snake like form into his body.

His blade fell from his grip, and rolled somewhere, as he grabbed hold of the creature and tried to pull it back.

That contact was like something forcing him under water.

He couldn’t breathe, and his thoughts were no longer his own, his body was no longer his own and he was 

_hungryweakhurthomeyeshomeletusincastielletusinangelyouknowus_

Cas screamed again, losing ground to this thing tearing him open as it tried to work in deeper, and he flailed around, looking for a weapon, anything, and then he remembered what was above him.

The lowest hanging limb of one of Jeremiah’s victims, fastened to the wall with a long, thick iron spike.

Cas grabbed at it, and yanked and it came loose, covered in dessicated skin and flesh, but it came and he drove it through the middle of the Leviathan’s body, impaling it to the cabin floor.

It was screaming, then, even if at a level only Cas could hear.

The pain as it jerked and shuddered, trying to get free from whatever was stuck through it, hurt him as well.

It was whipping its head and body back and forth, undoing all the work Cas’s Grace had done so far, and draining his last poor reserves of strength.

Still, Cas dug deep, his desire to return to his family, to go home, that desperation to not die here alone and in doing so leave another monster to threaten the people he loved, gave him power from somewhere.

He shifted sideways, along the wall, dragging himself when he had to, until the Leviathan, stretched beyond bearable limits, popped out of his body.

That hurt more than anything Cas had endured in that nightmare cabin, and the pain of it almost tipped him into unconsciousness.

But he held on; he had a monster to kill, and it would be now, it had to be, because the Leviathan was straining to reach him, more desperate than before.

It was tearing its own body loose of the spike, literally dying to get to him, because only one of them now could survive this.

Either he would, by killing it and healing and leaving this place as the angel he’d come in as. 

Or it would, having returned _home_ and would then use his body to destroy the world.

Cas spotted his angel blade, under an old table still bearing the body parts of Jeremiah’s latest victim.

He reached for it, and it came, not quickly, not flying through the air into his sure grasp, but rolling a painfully slow inch at a time.

The Leviathan saw it, and struggled harder.

Just as the spike started to jerk free of the wooden floorboards, Cas’s blade was within fingertip reach; he seized it up, pinned the Leviathan by the neck with one hand and drove the blade through its head with the other.

Only when he was sure it was dead did he finally let his body do what it needed to, and let oblivion claim him.

++

When he woke, he was aware of two things. 

He was not in as much pain as before.

He was also not alone.

Sam was looking down at him, and Cas saw the relief on his brother’s face as Sam saw he’d awakened.

The warmth Cas felt at that helped him realise he was warm in other ways too, and looked down to see Sam’s jacket was draped across him.

“Sam,” he said, and Sam petted his shoulder. 

“You’re okay,” he said. “We cleaned out your side, stitched it up, just to help. Had to use borax, just in case, because….”

He looked back, and Cas turned his head to follow, and saw the horrid black mass of the thing he’d killed.

The thing that had been half inside him.

He didn’t know he was shaking until Sam had carefully pulled him up into his arms.

“It’s okay,” Sam said. “I know, Cas, believe me, I know, but you stopped it. You saved yourself, you saved all of us. It’s okay.”

Cas heard footsteps then, and saw Dean coming in.

He looked angry and scared, and so worried that Cas felt guilty even though none of this was his fault.

There had been no way to anticipate Jeremiah’s bitter attempt at revenge, or the power he’d held capable of realising one of Cas’s worst nightmares.

Dean knelt down next to them, and cupped the back of Cas’s neck.

“You did good, Cas,” he said. “Now, c’mon, angel. Let’s get you home.”


End file.
